I have been quite baffled by the last few books I have read by Peter Heller. His earlier books had a plot, an arc, and a conclusion, if not the perfect resolution, and then I ran up against two or three that just seemed to…stop. They felt unfinished—they seemed confusing as to his intentions in writing them, and I was disappointed, because he is so gifted in his ability to capture the beauty of the natural world through his characters’ eyes that I will read nearly anything he writes, but…finally, in The Orchard, there is a cohesive story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending, even if they are slight and still take second place to his descriptive passages.

The book is a coming-of-age story told from the viewpoint of Frith, now in her 30s but looking back on her life from about age 12 onward. Her mother, Hayley, a renowed translator of the work of poets from the Tang Dynasty, walks away from her heroin-addicted husband and her career at a Denver university to set up house in a rustic cabin in the quiet hills of the Green Mountains of Vermont to raise her child. She and Frith move there when Frith is seven, and live a life that is both idyllic and hand-to-mouth, making a perilous living from selling the apples from their orchard and the syrup made from the maple trees they tap each year while thoroughly immersing themselves in the pleasure of vanishing into the pines.

The book is a combination of in-the-moment narrative with reminiscence, and is punctuated by some of the simple but transcendentally beautiful poems of Li Xue, translated by Hayley, as well as some poems that may have been Hayley’s own.

Hayley and Frith’s story starts out slowly, but builds to a deeply emotional climax. It’s all about the love of family, the joy of friendship, the experience of doing work that is fulfilling, and the quiet and perceptive appreciation of the natural world. This is not a book like some of Heller’s that are action-packed adventures with a bucolic setting; rather, it is a heartfelt exploration of humanity.

There were many slightly disappointed reviews of this book on Goodreads as being too simple, too slow-paced, not based in reality. It’s hard, sometimes, when you have come to expect a certain thing from an author, to receive something else; but Heller is almost always surprising, and I felt this one accomplished what was intended in a way that was both relatable and evocative.